An advantage of some desktop or third-party email clients is their ability to schedule sending an email. Outlook 2016 for Windows can do this, as can the macOS and iOS application Spark. There are also services/plugins you can buy to give you this feature, such as Boomerang.
At work, I sometimes delay sending emails till 7 or 8 pm, after I've left for the day. Some people feel an obligation to respond immediately to an email; I don't want to encourage that obligation, especially for trivia or simple follow-up tasks.
When I volunteered in our neighborhood association, I would have liked to send emails to my fellow volunteers later in the week. I inevitably thought of some other instruction or clarification I should have included after drafting the email, so a delay would have given me time to tweak my draft before it was sent.
My primary email client is Gmail, which does not offer a feature to delay sending outgoing mail. Nor does Apple Mail (the Automator workaround is WAY too fiddly to be useful). I could use Spark on my iMac, but the font it uses is so tiny, I cannot draft emails in it comfortably.
Hackers to the rescue! There is a Google Code project, Gmail Send Delay, that does most of what I want. It's free. It uses Gmail tags, so I could draft emails in Apple Mail or iOS Mail and use those Gmail tags to delay sending. And in my limited testing, it works.
But there are two or three things that make it something you cannot casually adopt and that keep me from embracing it wholeheartedly.
- The script requires access to your Google account, as you might expect. I don't mind doing this -- most of the applications I use require Google or Gmail access -- but it's something others may balk at.
- You need to remember to enter the time you want it sent in the first line of the email body. And while the time format is flexible, if you don't enter the time correctly, then the mail won't be sent.
- In addition to adding the email to specific Gmail label, you have to remember to keep the email in Drafts. Or put another way: you have to remember TO NOT CLICK SEND. While you can recall the message if Undo Send is turned on, the Gmail Delay Send script appears to deliver the mail anyway.
It's that last point that stops me using the feature more often. I've blundered one too many times with an incorrect time format or pressing Send, since that's the button I've been pressing for over a decade. I have to think a little too much to use this capability freely.
It may be time for me to try Boomerang again. It has extra features I'm not interested in, but its primary advantage is a big red Send Later button plus selectable time formats. The application is taking the burden of remembering off of me. I could get by with the free tier of service, since I would rarely schedule sending more than a few emails a month.
